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We want to update all our loyal customers about the service outages that many of you are experiencing today. It is not a technical issue. This morning, Microsoft served a federal court order and seized 22 of our most commonly used domains because they claimed that some of the subdomains have been abused by creators of malware. We were very surprised by this. We have a long history of proactively working with other companies when cases of alleged malicious activity have been reported to us. Unfortunately, Microsoft never contacted us or asked us to block any subdomains, even though we have an open line of communication with Microsoft corporate executives.

We have been in contact with Microsoft today. They claim that their intent is to only filter out the known bad hostnames in each seized domain, while continuing to allow the good hostnames to resolve. However, this is not happening. Apparently, the Microsoft infrastructure is not able to handle the billions of queries from our customers. Millions of innocent users are experiencing outages to their services because of Microsoft’s attempt to remediate hostnames associated with a few bad actors.

Had Microsoft contacted us, we could and would have taken immediate action. Microsoft now claims that it just wants to get us to clean up our act, but its draconian actions have affected millions of innocent Internet users.

Vitalwerks and No-IP have a very strict abuse policy. Our abuse team is constantly working to keep the No-IP system domains free of spam and malicious activity. We use sophisticated filters and we scan our network daily for signs of malicious activity. Even with such precautions, our free dynamic DNS service does occasionally fall prey to cyber scammers, spammers, and malware distributors. But this heavy-handed action by Microsoft benefits no one. We will do our best to resolve this problem quickly.

They have long been pretty heavy handed when it comes this sort of thing -- I was watching a presentation once where they took down a botnet's C&C servers but in the process hosed up a criminal investigation.

Anyway this reminds me that I really should set up another dynamic DNS, I let my dyndns one time out when they went paid and did not get another.

Ummmmm overkill much. I understand why microsoft wanted to takedown certain websites (for allegedly distributing malware), thats totally understandable, but taking out an entire domain host!? Isn't that a little much? What about all those innocent people who are using that same domain host and have nothing to do with the malware distribution. They should've contacted the domain host directly in regards to the sites in question and had those taken down (and site owner details handed over). There's no need to knock out the entire domain service geez.

Ummmmm overkill much. I understand why microsoft wanted to takedown certain websites (for allegedly distributing malware), thats totally understandable, but taking out an entire domain host!? Isn't that a little much? What about all those innocent people who are using that same domain host and have nothing to do with the malware distribution. They should've contacted the domain host directly in regards to the sites in question and had those taken down (and site owner details handed over). There's no need to knock out the entire domain service geez.

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To be fair they didn't intend to bring the whole thing down according to the OP, but their servers couldn't handle the traffic from the entire network. But yeah contacting them seems like it would have been a much better idea.

To be fair they didn't intend to bring the whole thing down according to the OP, but their servers couldn't handle the traffic from the entire network. But yeah contacting them seems like it would have been a much better idea.

still don't know what this has to do with microsoft i don't think anyone does...even NOIP?!

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Microsoft have a fairly decent computer crime investigation division, they do often partner up with various government agencies (mainly in the US but elsewhere too) and their people help with takedowns and whatever else related to their investigations -- governments usually welcome the help as investing computer crime is very time consuming, requires specialist people (and very few IT people worth their salt will ever be caught doing government IT) and generally very expensive. As computers, much less the internet, are very scary and complex a lot of judges and the like do give MS some fairly broad powers when it comes to acting upon intel.